Abraham Weintraub Re-elected Executive Director of the World Bank; mandate is two years | economy

Weintraub has already served on the bank’s executive board as a substitute, in a kind of “buffer mandate” that ends this Saturday (31).

According to the World Bank, the former minister was elected as the representative of Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Panama, the Philippines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago.

“Executive directors are not employees of the World Bank. They are appointed or elected by representatives of our shareholders,” the financial institution said in a statement.

Weintraub left the MEC in June amid a series of controversies. The subject of two inquiries, one investigating racist statements against Chinese and the other about threats to ministers of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), Weintraub was appointed by the Bolsonaro government for a vacancy outside the country.

In June, when the nomination was made public, the World Bank’s staff association even sent an open letter to the institution’s ethics committee requesting that the appointment be suspended.

The concern, according to the document, was related both to Weintraub’s offensive statements and to the measures he took at the head of the Ministry of Education, for example, the revocation of quotas for minorities in graduate courses.

In addition to the nomination for the bank, Weintraub’s own trip to the United States caused controversy, and is still under investigation.

This is because, despite having announced his departure from government on June 18, Weintraub was not officially exonerated until June 20, when he was already out of Brazil. The minister reportedly took advantage of the diplomatic passport to bypass quarantine for ordinary citizens upon arrival in the United States, amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

The case was presented by the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU) because the rapporteur, Minister Ana Arraes, said she saw no evidence that the trip had an impact on public coffers. Questions about the regularity of the use of the diplomatic passport were sent by the court to the Federal Public Ministry.